The story behind Rocket Jockey, and the 360 port you can’t play

Ars Technica has caught up with the mind behind the PC cult hit Rocket Jockey …

Sean Callahan wasn't expecting to be reading about a game he worked on when he was browsing Ars this week, but life has a way of sneaking up on you—especially when you're responsible for a cult hit on the PC. He e-mailed us and described his involvement in Rocket Jockey. "I came up with the quirky cable gameplay mechanic idea, designed the game, and wrote the physics engine it ran on, back what seems a lifetime ago now," he told Ars. "I didn't think anybody even knew that it existed anymore. Thanks for making my day!"

We couldn't let it end there, so we asked him to share some of his experiences and stories from making the game, from the team's hatred of the logo to the unofficial version of the game he plays on the Xbox 360 with his children.

Callahan said the ideas for the game came from a number of inspirations. "Using a grappling hook and cable to change direction came from one of the Batman movies where the Batmobile used something similar on a streetlight to turn a corner," he explained. "Having fast-moving flying vehicles where the rider was vulnerable came from the speeder bikes in Return of the Jedi." That movie also saw characters clotheslined off their rocket-shaped bikes. He was attracted to the idea of having the riders completely exposed rather than "encased" in a vehicle, making the action feel more personal.

One of the inspirations for Rocket Jockey

The game was prototyped in 1995 on a Macintosh system. The original plan was to release the game on the PlayStation, but "hardware limitations and longer lead times forced the switch to PC as the initial platform." Callahan worked alone until the fall of that year, and then Elliot Fan was hired as the art director, with Denis Fung as development lead. "The rest of the team was filled in over the following months, and by May of 1996 we were showing the game at E3. It finally shipped in October of 1996, with LAN support coming out early in 1997," Callahan said.

It's not surprising that features were left out of the first release: Callahan was working 24-hour days in the weeks leading up to launch, struggling to get the game finished. "By the end, I was so mentally immersed in running people down with rockets and so sleep deprived, that I had moments in a real car seeing real people in front of me, where instinct made me want to either hit the accelerator and steer towards them or veer away to line up a cable shot to take them down," he told Ars. "Luckily I was only a passenger at those moments and never behind the wheel."

Callahan refuses to take credit for the look or sound of the game. Elliot Fan designed the rockets and Chris Thompson came up with the funny rider names—such as Ace Ban Dage— and audio was provided by Tom Hays, who made the decision to go with surf music. He also provided the connections to get Dick Dale involved in the project. We used the game's logo for the first image of our Masterpiece article, but Callahan says everyone involved with the game hated the logo.

"The flaming skull and the tire tread-like pattern behind it had no relationship to the game and we thought it looked like bad tattoo art," he said, bringing up the time someone showed him a tattoo that looked almost exactly like the logo. "The marketing people created the logo and the head of studio approved it without our input. We added the helmet and goggles to the title screen image just to try to tie it to the game."

The game eventually shipped, and had a hard time for the reasons we described in the previous article. Callahan describes "testing" the multiplayer functionality while Rocket Science "circled the drain."

So where's the game now?

Sadly, unless you can track down an old packaged version of Rocket Jockey, there's no legal way to play. "As far as I know, it's never been legally available for download," he said. "The problem is the rights are in limbo with Rocket Science Games. Nobody can obtain the rights because no legal entity exists to license them."

Still, Callahan continues to work on the game. "Several years ago, I stripped all the Renderware dependencies out of the game and replaced them with Direct3D in order to get Rocket Jockey running again on PCs with modern 3D hardware," he told Ars. He still looks back with pride on both the single- and multiplayer aspects of the game. "Rocket Jockey is the last game I designed. I went back to software engineering and am currently a software architect in the Xbox group at Microsoft."

Well, he did work on at least one other gaming project, although we'll never get to enjoy it. He ported the game to the Xbox, and then the Xbox 360. "Since I don't have rights to the game, it's only playable in its current form by me and my kids."

I wish I had some happy ending for this story, but it remains hard to track down the original code, and there's little to no hope of a port coming out. There is still nothing like Rocket Jockey on modern consoles or the PC, and the love we've received in comments and e-mail since running the original story has been amazing. If nothing else, we know that the game has made an impact with fans, and learning more about how it was made has been fascinating.

"The love people have been giving the game has been amazing, especially after so many years," Callahan told us. "We always knew we had something cool, but figured that the circumstances of the company, the marketing, and the unconventional gameplay made it something that most people would never know about or play."